


Waking

by RogueBelle



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Rating: PG13, Reunions, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-21
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-05 17:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RogueBelle/pseuds/RogueBelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My take on the reunion between Jefferson and Grace that the finale denied us.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking

The breaking of the curse had no effect on Jefferson, but he still felt it, like someone giving him a shove in the small of the back. He knew what magic felt like, the slightly electric tingle raising the hair on the back of your arms, the faint scent of far-off spices, the flash causing your heart to skip a beat. He knew what had happened, far better than those residents of Storybrooke suddenly awakening to their long-forgotten selves. A grin surprised him by flickering onto his face. "Good girl, Emma," he said to himself. And then he was pulling on a jacket, lighting out his front door and down the hill. No reason to wait now, of course, no reason to stay alone in this monster of a house a moment longer.

Besides, if his guess was right about how the curse-breaking would work, she would _need_ him now.

He knocked on the door of the house he knew so well, though he had never been inside it. Sometimes – only sometimes – he felt a flicker of conscience about spying on Joseph and Sarah Tanner – or Mick and Bridget O'Flaherty, as they had thought themselves for twenty-eight years. But to Jefferson, they were still Joe and Sarah, still the people he could trust with his little girl because she reminded them of their own, taken in a pestilence years earlier. His conscience did not twinge at all, though, at the thought of taking his Grace from them now.

It took a while for anyone to come to the door, and Jefferson could hear a bit of a commotion going on within the house. Small wonder, really; Jefferson imagined there would be dramatic scenes going on in a great many houses across the town this afternoon.

Over the years, Jefferson had gotten a feel for who were the major players and who were the innocents. Snow and her Charming, Red and Granny, Ella and Aurora and Belle, fair maids and dashing heroes and schemers – they were all figures in the game, the same as Jefferson. Whether they were willing pieces or not mattered little. The story had decided for them. Theirs were the fates on which their universe hinged. It wasn't a matter of class; where they came from, goose-girls and kitchen wenches could find their way to greatness, and many princes and little lordlings ended up being quite inconsequential, so far as the stories were concerned.

But people like Joe and Sarah – they were just _people_. They had gone about their lives in Storybrooke as inoffensively as they had in the Forest, never harming anyone, never having adventures, never tangling their lives with the rise and fall of kingdoms, never turning to magic to solve their problems or to cause whole new ones. They farmed, they traded, they _lived_ , utterly normal and for the most part blissfully ignorant of the stories weaving themselves in the fabric of time. Jefferson had seen many worlds, and most of the people in all of them were like that, the background to the story, but so critical to it – for what is a King or Queen without those nameless subjects? And yet Regina had punished them, too, had ripped them from their homes without thought or compassion.

Jefferson had wanted to be one of them, had tried to remove himself from the board and take up the quiet life. Regina hadn't let that be an option for him, and Jefferson realised now that it probably never would be. Once in the game, there was only one way out – and he had no intention of walking that dark road anytime soon. Not while he had Grace to protect.

When the door finally opened, it was Joe, speaking before he actually looked at who was on his doorstep. "I'm sorry, but whatever it is you want, I'm afraid this is a bad ti—" He stopped, mouth hanging agape when he took in Jefferson's face.

"Joe?" came Sarah's voice from the hall. "Who's there?"

Joe's throat worked, but he had no words. In a moment, it hardly mattered – at least to Jefferson. Small feet thundered down the stairs, and Jefferson's heart gave a tremendous lurch when a familiar voice cried, " _Papa!_ " The small, fair-haired blur tore past the bewildered Tanners, hurling herself at full speed into her father's arms. Jefferson lifted her in a crushing embrace, tears springing to his eyes as she sobbed into his shoulder, over and over again, "I thought you were gone, I thought you were gone _forever._ "

"I know, baby, I know, I'm so sorry," Jefferson whispered, rubbing her back soothingly. "I'm here now, my dearest, my Grace." Decades' worth of heartache threatened to crack him in two, so great was his relief at having this, his one goal in all that time, fulfilled. "I love you," he said, and did not know how many times he said it, murmuring it into her cloud of honey-blonde hair.

"Never leave again, never ever ever."

But Jefferson had learned the pain of making promises it was beyond your control to keep. So much could happen, and with the rules of their world suddenly thrown upside-down… and Regina, Regina would be coming for revenge, sooner or later, once she'd worked out what he'd done. _'And assuming, of course, that she isn't lynched by an angry mob first…_ ’ Still, Jefferson was wary, and said only, "I sure don't want to, Grace."

As Grace's hysterics slowly subsided to hiccoughs and sniffles, Jefferson finally looked up. The Tanners were staring wide-eyed at him, as astonished as if they were gazing upon a ghost. From their perspective, they might as well have been. They had not seen him since he had left Grace with them that last time, left to take that ill-fated trip back to a world he hated. Of course they had assumed he was dead. Most people who went off with the Queen ended up that way.

"C-Come inside," Sarah suggested, weakly gesturing towards the back of the house. Jefferson nodded, shifting Grace to an easier carrying position. He followed Sarah back to their living room, trying not to give away that he already knew the layout of the house, as well as his own. "I'll… I'll make tea," Sarah said, grasping at any semblance of normalcy. "Or… or coffee. Or—"

"Tea will be fine," Jefferson said, lips twisting wryly at one corner. "Long overdue, in fact." Joseph, either sensing the delicacy of the situation or simply at a loss for what to do, followed his wife into the kitchen. Jefferson settled himself on the couch, with Grace next to him, and smoothed back his daughter's hair, scarcely believing that he _could_ , that she was here, and real, and his again. But despite that joy, the expression on her face was nearly enough to undo him – she looked so confused, and so scared. "How much do you remember?"

Grace swallowed, mastering her tears, trying to be brave, like the father she worshipped, trying to be good, like the mother she hardly remembered. "I do... and I don't. It seems like... like a story someone read to me, only I was in it." She blinked tearfully. "We're… we're somewhere else, and we have been for a long time, but we haven't been, too."

Jefferson had been afraid of this; oh, how much _kinder_ if the curse had simply removed all the memories of their time in Storybrooke, if it had wiped the slate clean. They would still have awoken to find themselves in a strange new land, but at least they would not now have another self struggling inside their heads. A fresh wave of guilt crashed over him, that he hadn't been able to protect her from this, and the thought that there _was_ no protection from it hardly soothed his tumult. "I know it hurts, my sweet one," he said. "But it will get easier. I promise you that. Just try… to keep things separate, in your head."

Grace nodded, but her lower lip was quivering. "Keep separate… what was Paige… and what was Grace?" 

"Something like that."

Her eyes flickered towards the kitchen, and Jefferson felt, with a stabbing pang, her conflict. The Tanners were good people, and had been good to her, both in the Forest and in Storybrooke. They had loved her as a daughter, when they thought she was theirs, and they had always cared very much for her. The crisis of loyalty was more than a such a young girl should have to stand. "I want to go home," Grace said, falling to weeping again.

"I know, baby," Jefferson said, holding her close. "I know." His heart bled anew, feeling her little body wracked with an anguish she could hardly comprehend. He would never have wished this on her, the pain of remembering – had fought to keep her sheltered from it, praying she would never have to know the mind-rending torment. But done could not be undone, and if she had to suffer it, at least she would not suffer it alone.

A short while later, Grace had exhausted herself completely, falling asleep with her head in her father's lap, her feet tucked up on the couch. Joe and Sarah had come to sit opposite them, bewilderment still written clearly on their faces.

"Forgive us," Sarah croaked, shaking her head. "It's just that… This is all so..." She pressed her hand to her forehead, apparently unable to explain.

Her husband picked up the thread. "The last we knew, you'd gone off with that Queen." All three adult faces darkened considerably; hard not to, now, knowing precisely who she was and what she was capable of, what havoc she had wreaked on so many lives -- not just those who had crossed her, but thousands of innocents like the Tanners as well. "When you didn't return... we feared the worst."

"It was," Jefferson replied, his voice hollow. "It... I..."

Sarah held up a hand. "There's no need to explain," she said, but with an implication that whatever it was that had been bad enough to keep him from his daughter, she didn't need that torment on her consciousness. Jefferson couldn't blame her for that; no one would want that haunting them.

"And now," Joe continued, "it's like… I don't even know what this is like. I know where I am, and I don't. Like when you're walking in the woods and suddenly find yourself at your destination, but you don't really remember how you got there, what route you took or what you passed along the way."

"I would think we were dreaming," Sarah ventured, "except that… I seem to be awake, and we're still here."

Jefferson stroked his daughter's hair, glad she had wept herself asleep. It would make things easier to explain to the Tanners, without having to couch it all in terms a child could understand. "Not dreaming," he said. "Cursed. The Queen—"

Sarah's lips pursed. "It would be."

"She's responsible. She brought you all here – everyone, everyone in our entire world, to this land, and she made you forget yourselves."

"Why?"

Jefferson shrugged. He neither knew nor cared about the particulars. "Revenge," was all the answer he had to give. Something sparked in his mind, though, something from that strange cellar where Regina had taken him, where she hoarded artifacts from their proper world. "She lost something – someone – a long time ago. And apparently she blames the entire world for it."

Sarah gave a noise somewhere between a sigh and a soft wail, fearful of an evil that could so broadly apply hatred. "How do you know all this?" Joe asked.

Jefferson looked up, and the haunted hollowness in his eyes struck both of the Tanners to the core. It was a wild, hungry look, the look of a hunting cat at the end of a lean winter. "The rest of you were cursed to a walking sleep. I was cursed to stay awake."

"You've—You've _known_?" Sarah asked, holding a hand to her chest. "All this time?"

"Nearly twenty-nine years," Jefferson replied, and Sarah was glad she was sitting down; she was sure that would have staggered her had she been on her feet.

"And you knew we had—" The words died on Sarah's lips before she could get to his daughter's name, and Jefferson wondered which name would have formed.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Joe asked. "All these years?"

A mirthless smile flitted across Jefferson's face. So many reasons, really, and most of them centered around not wanting to shatter the fragile walls of Grace's reality. But that would be so much to explain, would give away so much of himself, and so he gave Joe a simpler answer. "Imagine how you would have responded to that. A strange man turning up on your doorstep and laying claim to your daughter?"

"Oh yes... I suppose..." Joe had a faraway look; he was remembering being Mick, wondering how this other-self would have reacted, how similar or different it might have been to the self he now knew.

It would be easier for people like the Tanners, as Jefferson guessed that their selves in Storybrooke were less removed from their selves in their proper world than those of the major players. They had less to forget, after all, and less of Regina's rage focused on them. In his years of observation, he had rarely seen them, or others like them, behave in ways that would have surprised or shamed their real selves. He could not say the same for the story's prime movers.

Sarah had opened her mouth to ask another question, when suddenly a tremendous crack of thunder rattled the walls of the house. At least, it sounded like thunder, but it resonated too deeply, seemed to come from far away and right next to them at the same time, and it was so loud, loud enough that Grace startled awake. Sarah, who was facing a window, gasped, and Jefferson leapt to his feet with alarming speed, whipping around to see what had surprised her.

Clouds were rolling in, but it was certainly no typical early summer storm. A purple fog, thick enough to be near-viscous, tumbled on the ground, swarming locust-like over trees and buildings, obscuring the entire landscape. The hairs on Jefferson's arms and on the back of his neck stood on end. He caught the scent of cardamom and nutmeg and ginger on the air. His heart gave an irregular beat, momentarily arresting the breath in his lungs.

Magic.

The storm was magic, magic rolling in, rolling over Storybrooke, fierce and swift and inexorable. Jefferson didn't know if he was terrified or elated. Magic – magic could mean so much. It could be constructive, or it could spell total chaos – delight or destruction. If he could get his hat back from Regina, it meant he and Grace could go home – but home to an empty world, and what sort of a home was that?

He couldn't think about that now, and it was a moot point, anyway, until he could retrieve the hat. At least Regina would probably have more important things on her mind than thwarting him. 

He had Grace. That was what was important. And he was going to do whatever was necessary to make sure no one could take her away from him again.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this work, please check out [my blog](http://cassmorriswrites.com)! I also write original fiction, and my debut novel will be out January 2018.


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